Apart from the intimacy of the household, experiences of slavery could also have crept into white Afrikaans culture through that most influential of nineteenth-century musical fads – the blackface minstrel show. The significant influence of blackface minstrelsy on musical life in Southern Africa has been explored by Carol Muller (gumboot dancing), Veit Erlmann and Dale Cockrell (isicathamiya), and Denis-Constant Martin (Cape Town Coon carnival).32 Its influence on white Afrikaans culture, however, has thus far received little attention. A few remarks by Jan Bouws are the exception. In an article entitled “Minstrel, Too, Seem to Go On Forever”, Bouws writes that the minstrel hit “Jim Crow” was introduced in the Cape in the 1840s and that local groups known as “serenaders” staged minstrel-like shows since the late 1840s. The first group from overseas to call themselves “Christy minstrels”, however, only arrived in Southern Africa in 1862. According to Bouws the “songwriters were particularly productive during the American Civil War from 1861 until 1865”,
and although South Africa was far removed from the battlegrounds, songs like “Just Before the Battle, Mother”, “Ellie Rhee”, and “Old Folks at Home” stirred the heart. They were sung again and again, and then not only in Cape Town. All kinds of groups came to be formed by enthusiasts, some with rather odd kinds of names, like Roman Catholic Christies, that of the Psychological Association, the Afrikander Musicale.33
If minstrelsy could be the source of such popular Afrikaans folk songs (a related but distinct genre from boeremusiek) as Sarie Marais (a.k.a. “Ellie Rhee”) and Wanneer kom ons troudag, Gertjie (a.k.a. “Just before the battle, Mother”), and Daar ver op ons plasie (a.k.a. “Old folks at home”), it is entirely possible that blackface minstrelsy left its mark on boeremusiek too.
The earliest confirmation of this hypothesis is the 1862 diary entry by Lady Duff Gordon, mentioned in passing earlier, written the same year the Christy Minstrels arrived in Southern Africa. Gordon’s description of New Year celebrations merits further investigation and I therefore include it here at length:
32
Muller, Focus: Music of South Africa, 139; Veit Erlmann, African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 158-160; Dale Cockrell, “Of Gospel Hymns, Minstrel Shows, and Jubilee Singers: Toward Some Black South African Musics,” American Music 5, no. 4 (1987): 417-432; Martin, Coon Carnival.
33
Jan Bouws, “Die minstrels skyn die ewige lewe te hê,” in Solank daar musiek is...: musiek en musiekmakers in Suid-Afrika (1652-1982) (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1982), 80-82. Transl. by Gerald Stone.
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We have had tremendous festivities here – a ball on New Year’s-eve, and another on the 1st of January – and the shooting for Prince Alfred’s rifle yesterday. The difficulty of music for the ball was solved by the arrival of two Malay bricklayers to build the new parsonage, and I heard with my own ears the proof of what I had been told as to their extraordinary musical gifts. When I went into the hall, a Dutchman was screeching a concertina hideously. Presently in walked a yellow Malay, with a blue cotton handkerchief on his head, and a half-breed of negro blood (very dark brown), with a red handkerchief, and holding a rough tambourine. The handsome yellow man took the concertina which seemed so discordant, and the touch of his dainty fingers transformed it to harmony. He played dances with a precision and feeling quite unequalled, except by Strauss’s band, and a variety which seemed endless. I asked him if he could read music, at which he laughed heartily, and said music came into the ears, not the eyes. He had picked it all up from the bands in Cape Town, or elsewhere.
It was a strange sight, – the picturesque group, and the contrast between the quiet manners of the true Malay and the grotesque fun of the half-negro. The latter made his tambourine do duty as a drum, nodded and grinned in wild excitement, and drank beer while his comrade took water. The dancing was uninteresting enough. The Dutchmen danced badly, and said not a word, but plodded on so as to get all the dancing they could for their money. I went to bed at half-past eleven, but the ball went on till four.
Next night there were genteeler company, and I did not go in, but lay in bed listening to the Malay’s playing. He had quite a fresh set of tunes, of which several were from the “Traviata”!34
The scene Gordon describes bears strong resemblances to the blackface minstrel shows that were so popular all over the world at the time. First there is the tambourine played like a drum. The tambourine was, according to Robert Winans, one of the “primary rhythm instruments” of early minstrel show music.35 The minstrel tambourine “was larger than the common modern one and had fewer rattles”, which would suggest that “while the modern tambourine is more rattle than drum, the minstrel one was the reverse”. The contrast Gordon notes between the “quiet manners” of the Malay concertinist and the “grotesque fun” of the “half-breed” tambourine player may also point towards two of the stock characters of the nineteenth-century minstrel show: the “Interlocuter” and “Tambo”. The Interlocutor, usually in blackface, served as “bogus mouthpiece for the high culture” according to Alexander Saxton, and spoke “with a resonant voice, proper diction, and a rich vocabulary”.36 The “endmen”, Tambo and
34
Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from the Cape (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 80-81.
35
Robert B. Winans, “Early Minstrel Show Music, 1843-1852,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 142.
36
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 2003), 170; Michael Campbell, Popular Music in America: And the Beat Goes on (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2008), 25.
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Bones (so called after the instruments they played), “by costume and vernacular” were of a lower class “plantation nigger”.37 The different coloured handkerchiefs worn by the “picturesque group” on their heads, confirm the suspicion that the musicians in Gordon’s description might have alluded to minstrel costume.
That the concertina – today the lead instrument in boeremusiek and occupying iconic status in white Afrikaans culture – is mentioned in the context of what is ostensibly a minstrel-inspired scene is particularly interesting. From Gordon’s description of “a Dutchman … screeching a concertina hideously” one could infer that the instrument was a novelty in the region. It has been suggested that the banjo – another important boeremusiek instrument – was introduced in South Africa by travelling minstrel groups in the nineteenth century.38 It is plausible that the concertina was introduced by a similar route – especially considering the speed with which the instrument became popular among all racial groups in South Africa. That the concertina formed part of blackface minstrel shows in South Africa is evident from various sources. Bouws refers to an 1874 concertina competition in Cape Town with the prize of a gold watch where a “duet was performed in the manner of the minstrels to the accompaniment of a banjo and ‘bones’”.39 Dale Cockrell included the concertina in a list of instruments featured in a “typical minstrel show”, although he provided no references to support this claim.40 The concertina also featured regularly in English and American minstrel groups in the nineteenth century, leading Worrall to believe that the concertina “found a ready place in Cape Town ‘Christy Minstrel’ knockoff bands”.41
The possibility of the concertina being closely associated with blackface minstrelsy in nineteenth-century South Africa provides the beginning to unravelling the mystery behind how a musical tradition with a pronounced creole history could have become an emblem of white Afrikaans ethnicity during the twentieth century.
37
Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 170.
38
Worrall, The Anglo-German Concertina, 2:47.
39
Bouws, “Die minstrels skyn die ewige lewe te hê,” 81-82.
40
Cockrell, “Of Gospel Hymns, Minstrel Shows, and Jubilee Singers: Toward Some Black South African Musics,” 419.
41
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